Chris, that’s an awesome link, thanks for sharing.

Faris, will check out Rainbow’s End (although unfortunately I can’t find it on Kindle/iBooks… am I meant to read futuristic sci-fi on PAPER?). Spook Country and all of Gibson’s recent stuff are favorites.

While it reminds of Blade Runner, I’m with you, the future of integrated reality is a bright one.

re: snow crash-it literally invented the present, kind of

http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2007/07/inventing-the-f.html

re: integrated reality totally agree

http://farisyakob.typepad.com/blog/2008/10/the-invisible-web.html

don’t tell jaron lanier tho but frankly the vision of the singularity when we all become software [see straus's accelerando for that] is kind of depressing….

ALSO: when you are done maybe read rainbow’s end or spook country for interesting visions of what that future looks like…

FX

but you are right: privacy is not a be-all-end-all and there are forums that have a much more consistent and clear approach to privacy (personally i’m a big fan of how livejournal handles privacy, which is easy, granular, and clear in terms of customization and extends to its photo uploading service as well as its blogging.)

in fact i have no major beef right now with facebook’s approach to privacy but the reason i do not have that beef is because i have thought about the issue and reacted it and *changed my expectations and behaviors* for the site accordingly.

in future i will never share anything on facebook that i wouldn’t post publicly. in fact i’d hold it to a higher standard of what’s “public” than flickr or LJ (i make primarily public posts on LJ) because of its prominence, heterogeneity of audience, and scrutiny.

anyway, you’re not wrong; there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being public. and our culture is certainly increasing driving people to be public individuals, and to understand the difference between public and private and manage that in a way that was not necessary and/or desirable in the past, so you could even argue fb is actually responding to the natural trendlines rather than creating them, perhaps.

because the increasing popularity of facebook has attracted the attention of (entire classes of) people who were not originally involved with facebook when many early adopters were, and is changing users’ attitudes toward the site.

because facebook’s goals and biz models are obviously changing and user satisfaction is clearly secondary to this based on how the site’s behavior is changing and what zuckerberg et al say publicly.

so while your core argument is that “more open is (or can be) better” is not without merit, it requires a major refiguring about people’s assumptions about both their own personal interaction with facebook and ALSO what facebook broadly is AND how it functions in terms of both itself and the wide web. these are pretty fundamental changes.

my response to this BS (and i think i am a bit ahead of the curve here because i have something of a public persona, unlike many) is to just take all sensitive information OFF of FB.

but my life also defends me against embarrassment others might not be so insulated from: as a game journalist i’m (a) already a public person/persona, (b) in a liberal industry with liberal expectations of behavior. and i’m also an out gay man, so people are (at least marginally) prepared to see things on facebook relating to that.

essentially, what this has taught me is that not only can i not trust facebook now, i can never trust them TOMORROW, and i can never KNOW WHY i can’t trust them tomorrow. i just know i can’t. that’s troubling in a service i have to rely on for anything remotely important, which FB has become for online media professionals.

As far as Flash goes, I’m fairly certain that the reason it is not included is a business decision, not a personal one. Apple makes most of their money not from the device sales themselves but from the App, Music, and Book stores they provide. If Flash was enabled on the iPad/iPhone, a 3rd party developer could make and even sell access to, say, a Tetris game on a web site without going through Apple. This would destroy Apple’s business model. Might be a bit evil, but from a business perspective restricting access to Flash makes complete sense.

Also, even though I’ve read and heard arguments & articles for/against Flash, I’m still kinda baffled. There’s gotta be some kind of behind-the-scenes botched relationship between Jobs + the head of Adobe… yes?